Modern computing often requires the collection, processing, or storage of very large data sets or file systems. Accordingly, to accommodate the capacity requirements as well as other requirements, such as, high availability, redundancy, latency/access considerations, or the like, modern file systems may be very large or distributed across multiple hosts, networks, or data centers, and so on. File systems may require various backup or restore operations. Naïve backup strategies may cause significant storage or performance overhead. For example, in some cases, the size or distributed nature of a modern hyper-scale file systems may make it difficult to determine the objects that need to be replicated. Also, the large number of files in modern distributed file system may make managing state or protection information difficult because of the resources that may be required to visit the files to manage state or protection information for files. Thus, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.